


Half a Decade

by orphan_account



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Armageddon, Post-Canon, armageddon't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-14 01:21:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21007355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Five years after Armageddon had failed, Gabriel comes up with an idea to start it again- except this time, they're skipping over the dramatics and skipping right to the war. Agnes gathers up most of the people who stopped the last one to try and keep all of humanity from becoming collateral damage.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The artwork was made by the absolutely incredible [xealeye](https://www.instagram.com/xealeye/).  
This work was part of a Good Omens Big Bang, link [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/GoodOmensMiniBang2019).

The trouble about practical hereditary enemies meeting was that it always had to be on neutral ground. For an angel and demon, that meant Earth, but not just any part; somewhere not only neutral, but so much so that both think it’s an advantage to their respective sides if they meet there. They had consulted each other with a list of likely selections and settled with an unimportant city that neither side had really bothered to affect and seemed decently in line with what either found as acceptable.

Sure, Beezelbub had liked the general aura of misery that wrapped around the town like a particularly sticky piece of gum on someone’s shoe, but the corporate boringness and the way everything still worked like it should- well, that bit is particularly irritating. Likewise, Gabriel found the city reminded him somewhat of a miserable version of Heaven that was clearly planned right but executed… well, not nearly as well. It rather escaped both of them how things that should work out wonderfully for their side ended up corrupted (or blessed) in an entirely unpredictable way. But that was just the other side’s interference, Gabriel supposed.

And so it was that in the early morning of somewhere, a tall man wearing bright pearly greys and lilacs that seemed to imply being much more important than whoever was watching met someone quite a bit shorter who dressed and looked somewhat like a former street rat who could still very much rip someone’s throat out if they looked at them funny in a coffee shop. They never could remember which side made those.

“So. How’s Hell treating you, nowadays?” Gabriel flashed a bright, heavenly smile that Beelzebub had never quite stopped wanting to rip off of his face. He pulled a face at the sight of the black coffee Beelzebub had ordered as they glared, daring him to speak. “Personally, I’m surprised you wanted to meet here. Isn’t this a bit heavenly for your tastes?”

“Hell’z the zame as alwayz,” a fly dodged a rolled-up newspaper in the booth next to the mostly immortal beings and gleefully landed on top of a very well-decorated strawberry cake. Judging by the irritated noises coming from another booth and a demand to shut the doors, dammit, it’s not even that hot and the flies are coming in, someone had noticed. Beelzebub glanced away from the dreary greyness outside the window and stopped contemplating how the passage of time could be used in Hell’s torture chambers, taking a leaf from Heaven’s playbook. “Couple of demonz are zztill pissed over Armageddon, but they alwayz zztep in line eventually. And for thiz plaze, I’m not entirely zure what you mean- I can almost tazte the mizery here.”

“Odd- I personally think it’s very efficient. And yes, about that.” Gabriel spread his hands and the smile returned, brighter than ever. Nobody had really mentioned the general absence of a great big smoking crater where Earth used to be after the day it was supposed to happen, but angels had always possessed excellent ways of radiating subtle disapproval. He did not very much enjoy the prospect of suffering like that until the two sides met again and restarted the incredibly time-consuming path of figuring out how the puzzle fit back in the right way after some beings had managed to rip half of them apart, torched a corner, and replaced some pieces from flaming doom with rainbow unicorns that were entirely the wrong size. “I had an idea the other day-“

“You want to rezzztart it,” Beelzebub deadpanned, their expression stiff. They laced their fingers behind their still untouched drink- it was mainly a prop, anyway, and mostly the heat just felt nice near them. Nobody except those aligned with the humans had liked how it turned out, and it was high time for another try after everyone had calmed down somewhat- not forgotten, as anything with lives of thousands of years had long memories, but looked at without everyone fuming about the mess that was made. Not fuming too visibly, at least. “After everything that has happened, you’d better have a proper plan.”

“Right,” the Archangel said, violet eyes radiating something that failed to show human sincerity. He looked like the idea of an angel dug up from millenia in the past and reminded a nearby waitress of everything wrong she had ever done- Hell was cruel by default, but Heaven was startlingly terrifying when it needed to be. He waved a waiter (John, according to his name tag) away as he tried to take his order, and though nobody could call that rude there was something subtly too disinterested about him that creeped out the waiter. “What happened last time gave me an idea. If it’s true that the whole thing doesn’t need all the tradition that simplifies things somewhat.”

“Yezzz, it doez,” Beelzebub nodded again, blue eyes meeting Gabriel’s. “We’ll have to deal with all the rogue elementz, az well. Get all the… chickens lined up, I think humans say. How long?”

“How about a month?” He beamed with the texture of burning glass.


	2. Chapter 2

One lovely summer day several years back, people living in the town of Tadfield woke and found with mild surprise that they had been going to and sending their children to a secondary school in that very town for decades. Without any way to properly express their confusion, they settled with smiling and nodding whenever the school was mentioned. Everyone was a bit hesitant to talk about the school in case of being thought mad, so they never did. They never noticed everyone inside acted so much nicer than they should have, either, and those who did put it from their minds with astounding dedication.

That very fall, Adam started at the school. It had been the last major display of odd things happening around the former Antichrist, but this time he almost properly noticed something odd was going on. Perhaps even helped along a bit, urged by a natural curiosity and the want native to all human beings to make lives easier for themselves. Sure, it had cost months of generally imagining things, but in the end nobody really could quite fault the school. There were good teachers and educational classes- more or less. Despite everyone’s firm attempts to separate the Them, though (not that they really called themselves that anymore, having outgrown the name a while back), their names unerringly found themselves mostly together every year for classes. Sure, Wensleydale moved forward in more advanced maths classes and Pepper had her stages of being interested in history, but overall what mattered was that for most of the day the group was together. Still, They had drifted with time as everyone did after a while. Even people who had once saved the world together and forgotten about it.

The day was lovely and crisp, like all the days before it. Before that the crispness had almost instantly melted from warm summer with clear skies, and gave every indication of turning into a snowy landscape in the winter like all the years before it. Slush and hail still had not appeared in Tadfield for sixteen years. Still, something was slightly off in the air, a faint smudge of supernatural energy putting those nearby on edge. Something was different, and Brian was one of the first to feel it.

He twitched, stopping a few meters before his football rolled to a stop. The teenaged boy glanced up, then to the right immediately with the human instinct typically reserved for candy shop displays, attractive members of their species, terrifyingly abnormal constructs of reality, and lots of money. Brian paused, not quite sure what he was looking for, and for the smallest moment there was someone in a neatly cut suit standing by a tree looking toward his class. The figure was somewhat blurry, and try as he could Brian’s eyes couldn’t focus on his face even if they had been close enough. The figure turned toward him.

Brian wasn’t quite sure why he had picked up his football when he was clearly intending on kicking it back. He glanced down, trying to shake the feeling of two sharp grey eyes staring at him and grasping at something not quite there in his mind. A kick of the ball that went a few degrees wide, however, managed to distract him. Behind him, something human-shaped smiled with too many teeth.

The student next to Wensleydale was clicking her pen again, cheap plastic moving in a tone that was decidedly unrhythmic. She pressed the bottom against her chin and pretended not to notice the looks in her direction and pointedly clicked it again, but ultimately stopped and resumed her usual puzzled frowning at the lines of neat numbers in her textbook. Wensleydale lined up some equations in his notebook and began drawing a chart with liberal application of a ruler. His pen- dark blue, ballpoint, smooth writing ink- slipped and drew a stray line across the margin, the ruler following. Those incidents had always irritated him somewhat, but more at himself for not doing better than at the general world for making them happen. He reached into his pencil case for some white-out and his eyes settled on another student staring absently out the window. Strange, he’d never seemed the daydreaming type. 

Wensleydale moved his gaze outside and saw nothing of interest, which seemed rather odd because there was always something going on around the school. Most of the time, birds were visible from any spot, and there were always interesting clouds in the sky at least. He shook his head- nothing- and it took some time for him to register a man standing against a nearby wall and looking into his exact room. Had he not been distracted by the small thump of an unlikely textbook stack falling from a table, Wensleydale might have questioned why he didn’t automatically pick up on dark suits against cream walls. But he did not, and his very first thought after the distraction passed went immediately to cleaning the stray line on his table with no recollection whatsoever of what might have been outside the window. Behind him, his classmate kept staring.

Pepper had just finished tossing a nutritious non-GMO all-natural sugar-free plant-based snack made with whole foods packed by her mother, which left quite a lot to be wanted. It was soggy and green and tasted rather like the cardboard she was served every single time had been given a new healthy alternative to try. Personally, she didn’t see what was so good about it but it took all types to create that sort of food. She had never quite understood humans’ penchants for making life miserable for themselves. There was the slightest glimpse over her shoulder of a silhouette reflected from a plastic-covered billboard, and Pepper glanced backward to see nothing. She blinked, shook her head, and walked away, leaving a human-shaped figure not quite loitering behind her. There was too much purpose, a passerby thought, for them to seem like they didn’t belong, but that was too much. The intensity of his stare, though, put him out of place just as well. Better, even.

At precisely six minutes twenty-three seconds after lunch, Adam slowly put down his sandwich (ham and some sort of vegetable peeking out sadly over the sides as if wondering what its purpose was in life) and stared right ahead without hesitation. The Them still ate together, though some drifting had gone on- people sometimes came and left from their group, but through the years they had remained the same. “Brian. Wensleydale. Pepper,” he said, a bit of something not quite human or perhaps entirely too human in his voice. The Them looked as not quite one being, but close enough, and something shifted slightly in the universe for them to see something off that became clearer by the second. “Look, by the water fountain- focus.”

And then they suddenly remembered. By some coincidence Pepper spotted the angel first, standing too still to be properly alive. She gave a start as she looked to the side and saw the same angel already standing there, not quite looking at anyone in particular. Another side saw the same one half-hidden behind a pillar. By the time she looked back, the first one had gone. 

“There’s a bunch of clones in suits?” Brian ventured, glancing from one to the other. Something was still off, though, he knew- they almost never were in the same place at the same time. He was dimly aware he wasn’t as surprised as he probably should have been for this new development in the world.

“I’m not seeing two of them at once, though,” Wensleydale decided, closing one eye then the other. “It’s like it’s moving when we’re not looking.”

“Don’t blink, I guess,” Pepper decided, casting a quick look at a thoughtful Adam, and the three others fell silent as Adam began to speak. He paused after every few words, not quite sure what he was saying but sure it was important as soon as he figured it out.

His tongue poked out between his teeth as the former Antichrist started, gaining traction with each syllable. “Well, it’s definitely not normal. And I think Wensleydale’s right, one… thing. That probably moves away when we’re not looking. And they’re here for-” he swallowed. “Probably looking for me. Let’s move.”

Alarms blared from dozens of speakers. Adam was already moving, the rest of the Them looking at him as if he’d gone slightly mad but following all the same. All in a day’s work, after all.


	3. Chapter 3

In later years, Anathema liked to think she had been expecting something like this to happen for quite some time now. She regretted burning Agnes’ book, after all, and she had known, more or less, that she probably could have foretold that. Maybe the book had even been blank and Agnes never bothered writing anything inside just to laugh at her thinking she was going to destroy her prophecies. 

Still, Newt was the first person to pick up the package on a Sunday. There never was mail on Sundays, which in retrospect should have alerted him that something was going on- that, and all the stamps that meant an overseas package. He had no way of knowing how it got there, of course, but Agnes had been very amused at a plan that involved hiring an indebted mason to chip words into rock walls as well as a couple of incredibly bewildered archaeologists and a book deal that ended with a flash drive being deposited directly into Newt’s hand as he opened a letter simply addressed to ‘Mr. and Mrs. Pulcifer’ at their house. Modern humans were so much better at giving addresses when it came down to their line of work. By habit, Newt dropped the flash drive onto the nearest table and waited for Anathema to come home from a bit of after-work surveying of the area. 

Several hours later, the flash drive was carefully plugged into an old, disposable computer Newt wasn’t allowed to and wasn’t about to touch. Anathema clicked open a folder, frowning as she saw a file with a few pictures of loose pages, arrows on rock walls, and a couple of text files depicting their contents. Newt stood by, careful not to interfere.

The file titled READ_ME was surprisingly detailed for one of Agnes’ materials, primarily because it hadn’t been written by her.

To Miss Anathema and Mr. Newton Pulsifer,

Hello. Until this morning, approximately a week before you got this message, I was the leader of a rather nice archaeology team called in near an old English village to look at rock carvings. The village has formerly been known to have been found with many inhabitants buried en masa’s through what looks like shrapnel wounds, but that’s a different story. 

The cave system, anyway, was surprisingly small. It was also rather disappointingly not as old as it seemed- despite a few paintings of speared cows that turned out to have been written and dated by an artist thousands of years after they were last made, my team found what essentially amounted to a treasure hunt through the former village that ended up with breaking open a metal box under a mudbank that contained some interesting symbols and a book that was surprisingly intact given the time it was apparently inside there. I should probably make a detour here and note that about a third of our group, myself included, were quite interested in the occult even though most didn’t practice it. 

Regardless, inside we found the book had some very specific and choice words inside that did not cause great motivation to read further, as well as some very specific instructions. I have taken the liberty of removing several pages that contained particularly sensitive information on everyone inside, and this is me following the instructions to the letter- this is a letter addressed to you two, telling you to use the internet to get another version printed and a general summary of what’s happened; and in the meantime rip off the first few pages and send them to you. Whoever this Agnes was, I would really like to avoid her for the rest of her life. 

And there is one more thing I’m supposed to pass on to you. Apparently, Armageddon is coming again, and you’re really going to need help on that front. 

Good luck.

The printer hummed as Anathema began printing out papers. Newt bumped up against it as he began taking out the prophecies, and it buzzed, shook, and began shredding the rest of the papers while emitting an acrid smoke. Two lightbulbs burned out along with half the room’s power supply. Newt grinned; he was getting better.

“Right- first prophecy,” Anathema said once they had evacuated the house. She fished into the pile of slightly crumpled papers and took out the first. Her mind immediately got ready to translate the odd spellings, accustomed to a lifetime of reading them. “Huh.”

“London 73773687,” she frowned, glancing over the digits with a puzzled expression. “London?”

Newt leaned over to look at the numbers and counted under his breath. “Phone number, maybe? Area code, and then… uh, numbers? For a phone?”

“Right,” Anathema nodded, patted her pocket, and went back inside the house with a sleeve over her nose and mouth to retrieve her cell. She needn’t have bothered; the smoke had mainly dispersed by then, and the sizzling wreck of a printer had just finished choking to death on its own cartridge. 

She dialed the number. “Hello?”

“Uh, are you okay?”


	4. Chapter 4

Aziraphale gestured vaguely at a pile of doll-sized old books at the back of the Bentley, which neatly rearranged themselves by subject and size after having fallen off due to a sharp turn. “Really, my dear, can you go a bit slower next time?” he yelped, clutching onto his seat belt for dear life. He wasn’t very sure Heaven would want to give him a replacement body if he managed to get splattered all over a wall and personally wasn’t very keen on the idea of floating about as a disembodied spirit that probably wouldn’t even be able to pick up anything. And humans were always so annoying to possess. Sleep, for one.

He had just managed to grab Crowley for a quick trip to pick up a couple of books at what he had called a small book sale that turned out to involve driving around the city picking up anything that remotely caught Aziraphale’s eye had the potential to stretch quite a bit longer. They were both complaining, of course, but it was generally more for the sake of habit and appearance than anything else. Crowley legitimately enjoyed Aziraphale’s presence, and Aziraphale reciprocated just as much even if they did bicker very passionately about most anything most of the time. 

The truth was that they really did kind of miss each other; after a certain apocalypse was averted they had tried to meet up every once in a while. 

“Shall we get dinner after this?” Aziraphale asked after a bit of silence, his knuckles whitened as he clutched onto some books that he didn’t trust to be left in the back seats. Another minor miracle had ended with all the volumes neatly strapped together and stuck onto the seats with tartan, which Crowley was still grumbling under his breath about. 

“Dinner? Angel, it’s an hour until lunch,” Crowley complained, and as he spun the steering wheel of the Bentley Aziraphale hung on for his dear corporation. He liked that one. “For Hell’s sake, Aziraphale, don’t make me go through another seven hours of this nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense, it’s nice! And for Heaven’s sake slow down,” Aziraphale protested and his lips had begun forming the next sentence before both of them noticed that Crowley’s phone was ringing- and not the car, but a new cell he had just lifted off of some conceited individual who was waving it around mere minutes before its release. It was black and sleek and was exactly the type designed to shatter in the first five seconds of being held so the user never knew what qualities were lacking. Since it knew what was good for it, having been introduced to the potted plants a while after Crowley decided he was going to try sleeping again, he had never found out.

“This is Crowley speaking,” he said, taking a hand off his wheel to an immediately terrified reaction of the angel next to him. “Who is this?”

“Put your hand back on your wheel this is dangerous WATCH OUT FOR THE PASSERBY-”

“What? Keep it down, Angel, I can’t hear-”

“I SAID BOTH HANDS ON, NOT BOTH OFF-”

“Hgk,” Crowley said into the phone, not particularly listening to the ranting angel as he used his other hand to shut off music that may have at one point been classical. “Are you sure?”

“YES, I’M POSITIVE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HOLDING THE WHEEL. SOMEONE’S GOING TO NOTICE AND DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG I’LL HAVE TO WORK BEFORE THIS GETS FIXED I DON’T-”

“Urgh,” Crowley continued in a horribly cheerful voice. “Graah. Oh, yes, I’m here.” Then the car turned around in a highly illegal manoeuvre that wasn’t even for showing off. “Say again?”

“IT’S BEEN DECADES, WHY CAN’T YOU STILL DRIVE-”


	5. Chapter 5

It was always so much easier to explain the specifics of the world ending to someone who actually remembered the last time it happened so much better than one had themselves, Anathema supposed. Well, there weren’t enough people who knew what was going on to form a rule, but generally that seemed true even without appropriate sample sizes. 

Aziraphale had somehow managed to rearrange the meeting place from Newt and Anathema’s cottage to a café to a fancy restaurant a few towns over from Tadfield moments after they realised they didn’t actually know where to meet. Inexplicably, a restaurant that had never opened until dinner for years had managed to open with an astounding alacrity partially helped by everything going right and cooking faster than possibly anyone had ever seen before. If someone had created an Olympic sport for speed-roasting food, they would have easily won first.

So when the angel and demon arrived, the only thing they found was a harassed-looking waiter trying to explain the exact meaning of dress in fine dining restaurants to Newt and Anathema and politely conducting people inside at the same time. Newt looked like a printer had blown up on him and Anathema was, in his opinion, looking a tiny bit mad. (Occult, a more learned individual than he would have said. But his hiring points as a waiter had nothing to do with how much he knew about magic, which was a damned shame because it would have made everything so much easier for Anathema.)

Crowley snapped his fingers and the waiter promptly wheeled around and conducted them all to their seats. He dismissed his own menu and leaned forward. “You said a week, right?”

Anathema nodded and slid a few papers held together by a few staples over the table. It had been held together like a book- something in that design just made her feel slightly better and experienced. She had dealt with book prophecies before, she could do it again if it looked like a book. Newt could theoretically use something as low-tech as that most of the time without breaking after a bit of practice, but occasionally he would manage to break a spring or attach it to the closest hard surface. So she did most of the stapling when things were important. Aziraphale leaned forward as well over his menu, food out of his mind for now but not entirely forgotten. In the time after the apocalypse, he had decided that if he was going to go out that he was going to enjoy it- and prospects of averting one that the two sides had actually prepared for seemed such a remote prospect that he had decided to take his time simply soaking in everything that humanity had to offer. Sure, Aziraphale would fight, but not because he thought his chances were very good when it came down to it. Still, prophecies and such were still firmly in his interests. 

“Interesting,” he said, turning over several of the pages. He hadn’t gotten better at the art of looking through prophecies- even Anathema had only arrived there years ago because of generations of brains all working on each prophecy. “They all seem rather more specific than usual, for her style. The ones that have been drawn over are probably for the archaeologists you said dug things out- the rest seem mostly to be in effect in the next few days.”

“Like that one,” Anathema supplied, pointing out Crowley’s number written clearly on top of the page in her own handwriting. “Newt figured it out- Crowley’s phone number. I think Agnes had a vision or something of the specific number and just wrote it down. It’s certainly more clear than one that had something to do with… Adam’s phone number, I think.”

Crowley shrugged and wondered if they found that the digits meant something. Sure, he enjoyed being on-the-nose and occasionally giving conspiracy theorists some gas to burn out on, but his personal number was just essentially for his own amusement.

“So. Say anything about the Antichrist?” he asked, not quite keen on ordering his own food. “Or whatever time Armageddon’s supposed to happen. Shouldn’t they need the boy for that?”

Anathema flicked the makeshift prophecy book to a certain page and read it out loud- somehow, she was able to pronounce the odd spellings as well. “Prophecy three: Beware, for they do notte playe by the rules. Prophecy eight: In three nightes the flames shalle start. Prepare welle, for they are moste difficulte to foole.”

“Hang on- flip back, there,” Newt frowned at the pages. “The one about the trees. I think I know where we need to go.”


	6. Chapter 6

The woods would always be Their woods, sure, but once all was said and done it was simply infeasible to keep meeting near a bunch of trees to play once children reached a certain age. Wensleydale began growing out of it first, beginning to bring homework and such to Tadfield’s woods, but the final nail in the coffin, as most of the Them had always held, after taking toys out of the woods or needing a bigger chair for Adam or complaining about the lack of sustainable cell service, was Brian bringing over a girl from school. They hadn’t been properly together in the woods, just friends, for years.

“I just… know that we should be there,” Adam explained, brows furrowed, as he headed toward their old meeting spot. He had matured somewhat, less in the typical image of a perfect child and somewhat more independently human. Dog followed behind, still excitable and happy but larger and somewhat older than before. “Kind of like… you get what’s supposed to happen and how to get there, but not really why.”

“Kind of like when the Thing happened?” Pepper asked, walking alongside Adam in a way she thought was not at all following. The Them had taken to calling the event five years ago they never could quite remember the Thing, and had always suspected- or known- that Adam knew more than he was letting on. They could remember possibly fighting something, or maybe dreaming, and everyone woke up in their beds the next day with only hazy recollections and odd concepts of the day of the week. Everyone except Adam, that was.

“Sure,” Adam nodded, and stayed silent the rest of the way. Brian fished a slightly crushed bag of crackers from a pocket, shaking free dust, and noticed that the woods seemed less storybook than he recalled. It was darker, with trees that were somewhat shorter, and sad clouds were gathering overhead. Strange; he never could remember there being a cloudy day in his childhood. Must have been the climate.

They took a strange turn by a familiar tree, and everything suddenly became different. The woods had grown in the time they had been gone, slowly losing the appearance of those expected in a typical English childhood. Adam looked around a few times, still walking through the grass, and finally stopped near a few charred, fallen trees and swung down his backpack. The Them followed suit, Pepper taking a spot on a neighbouring tree and the other two sitting a bit away. They knew not to interrupt Adam when he got like that, and in some way in the back of their minds they knew he never had been quite normal even if none of them quite had the words for it.

“It’s private here,” Adam explained as Dog bounded up to his lap, fur slightly mangy from the walk. He absently stroked his pet, looking a bit over everyone’s shoulders and slightly off into the distance. “The… people you saw at school. They’re not entirely human.”“Yeah, you bet,” Brian spoke, forcing a laugh. He wasn’t entirely sure if he really believed in what was happening and had always cultivated some unconscious sense of there being a joke played on him. He fiddled with something in his bag, taking a while to take out a packet of slightly crumpled sweets. After all, it did seem like they were going to be there for a while. 

“He did seem very odd, though. And focused on Adam, which isn’t something most people would do. *I’d* focus on Pepper,” a shrug was thrown at the Pepper as Wensleydale straightened his tie slightly. Pepper nodded in acknowledgement and had begun to speak by the time Adam interrupted.

“Trust me, they’re not human. That’s why some people will be coming. Some of them aren’t exactly people, but they’re alive. And on our side- we saw them at the airbase.” The Them glanced around rather expectantly, having learned long ago to associate references of everything that happened at the airbase as some sort of collective memory that everyone denied until Adam brought it up again. “Later,” Adam amended hastily as he noticed Brian beginning to express his concerns about how very unrealistic everything was seeming. He never did have the best sense of timing. 

There was probably less awkwardness than would typically be expected for a normal group of friends waiting for supernatural beings and others to approach, but given the natural skepticism of teenagers as a rule throughout the universe anything people tried to pass the time with fizzled out after half a minute. Wensleydale got out his maths homework, tapping the end of a pencil thoughtfully against a chin as he thoroughly lost Brian, who was looking over his shoulder. Pepper began throwing slightly pointed remarks for no other reason than conflict to Brian, and through all this Adam watched in a supernatural sense of calmness that freaked them out a little. 

Twenty minutes in, Brian was willing to declare that nobody was coming and beat a retreat back to his house for a bit of an early dinner or at least a snack. The sound of breaking twigs and cloth rustling through branches became apparent shortly, though. Pepper spotted her first, wearing a distinctly more practical dress that was better for walking through the relatively tame wild with. She did preserve the general witch colour scheme and design, though. “Anathema?” She asked the woman, who was holding up a map and referencing a folded packet of paper as she walked.

“It should be right about-“ the witch stopped, Newt next to her, and gave the group a quick once-over. “Agnes has never been very good with giving directions without using ‘walk until’ and specific step counts. How many steps was that?”

“Four hundred thirty-three,” Newt offered. “And what looks like four more to get there. Mind if we sit? We’ve been walking for a while.”

The sound of faint bickering came from quite a bit behind.

“You kicked a rabbit! An innocent creature whose only crime was-” 

“I’m a demon, that’s what I do! Spread chaos and misery all throughout- ah, hello, er, Antichrist.”

“Adam,” the former Antichrist corrected. “And not really, anymore. Haven’t got that much power, anyway.”

“Well, there goes the original plan,” Aziraphale said, looking rather put out by the developments. He sat down, a nice picnic blanket appearing between him and a log. Crowley cringed at the tartan and leaned against a nearby tree. “Miss Anathema, are you entirely sure there isn’t a plan somewhere in that book?”

Anathema flipped to yet another random page and frowned. “Top of the page- oh, this one’s annotated. the archaeologists think it says something about angels and demons screwing it up for the better.”

“Not helpful,” Crowley supplied, contributing a bit of general negativity. Old habits died hard and faded never. “Telling everyone the world’s going to end happily isn’t exactly reassuring.”

“It looks singular, though- look, ‘The angel and deville do worse than they know, but alle ends welle.’, I think,” Anathema squinted at the words and handed it to an interested Aziraphale. 

“So it’s either us messing up but it ends up alright in the end or the world-destroying people- well, things- doing so, and either way it ends okay, which could either mean Armageddon isn’t as bad as we think or it doesn’t happen?” Wensleydale asked, brows knitted in faint puzzlement. They had gotten a rundown on the general history of Agnes Nutter in the space of a minute. “No wonder her books didn’t sell well.”


	7. Chapter 7

“You are completely sure that he is of no consequence?” Gabriel asked for the upteempth time as he leaned on his spear, not particularly fond of the thing. Weapons were good and all, but they simply did not look good with the lines of his suit. His trumpet was still back in Heaven, waiting to be used once everything was mobilised, more or less.

Beelzebub hefted a rocket launcher over their shoulder. “You sent the angel,” they pointed out with no small amount of annoyance. “Who reported. To you. I should be the one azzking.”

“Still,” Gabriel worried, glancing upward. “They started preparing a while ago but it could take a few hours. Heaven, you see- all the paperwork and such, and it took so long to get everyone on the exact same page on everything. Who knows what the humans have gotten up to.”

“Shut up,” Beelzebub snapped, as helpful as ever. “Thiz hazz been planned. We get the armiezzz. We fight. Hell wins.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” a stunningly witty retort was cut short by the arrival of a Bentley covered in a few eye-bending supernatural symbols drawn in marker that made a few pieces of shielding that were only slightly effective. They’d probably survive a normal crash, but a few demons smashing the windows in was not going to be stopped for more than a few seconds. Still, Anathema had contributed somewhat- much to the utter shock of Crowley who almost point blank refused to drive the car until it became apparent it was either that or borrow someone else’s car. They weren’t about to be washed off in a hurry.

Stil, if someone was going to drive the car crashing into Armageddon, it was going to be Crowley and nobody else. He had a sense of style, after all.

More people filed out of the car than a normal one could comfortably hold. It all had to do with a miracle and something about atoms but not really, but an explanation had bored half the people in the car and Aziraphale had given up a minute or so in. 

Crowley and Aziraphale glanced to each other and moved out, closing the doors behind them. If they were going to watch the world end, they were probably going to die anyway even if they survived the initial bloodbath and massacre. If not, well, any little bit counted.

“I thought I told you,” Adam said as he walked up, his voice pleasant but reverberating off all the wrong harmonics to become audible to everyone present. He was taller now, which didn’t amount to much but still ended up making him look slightly more intimidating. There was just something heavenly and hellish power couldn’t account for that an increase in height could. “Earth was off limits.”

The Them arranged themselves in a loose semicircle behind him, Dog following close behind but keeping back. Maybe he still clearly remembered what it was like to be a Hellhound and on some primal level refused to go back. Pepper had her arms crossed to one side and Brian and Wensleydale were cowering in significantly different ways to another. 

On the other side of the car, Newt hurriedly referenced books with complicated sigils as Anathema dragged some chalk over a neat mat that was already partially filled by runes. If they were able to pull off something complicated and powerful, the best plan to date was, and attribute it to Adam, they could get an extension of maybe decades or even centuries until they felt they could try again. Aziraphale leaned over the hood and motioned that Anathema was doing it wrong, then scooted over and miracled up his own piece of chalk. Anathema gestured to a symbol and Aziraphale made some complicated gestures that didn’t make much sense to anyone watching. “It’s not working!” she hissed to Newt, grabbing the book out of his hands.

They needed a power source, and Adam was too weak while Heaven and Hell were too different from normal human symbols to use. Luckily, Gabriel was mostly focused on the former Antichrist, although Beelzebub was beginning to stare. Crowley dragged Aziraphale back to hide behind the car. He wasn’t about to risk getting incinerated by holy water, on second thought- maybe they’d forget that he was supposed to be immune.

“You cannot fight uzzz. We are far more inevitable than the Horsemen,” this time, years later, Beelzebub did not bother to disguise their clearly inhuman nature. “There will be no prozezz zave for the clazhing of the zzzwordz. Humanity will die. Everything you stand for will die.”

“You have zero chance of stopping us, boy,” Gabriel smiled almost pleasantly, and though he was still somewhat worried about Adam’s potential powers didn’t let it on. Just because something was visible doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. “We’re not even really aiming for Earth this time. Walk away now and everyone survives, more or less. They’ll all be remade better when Heaven wins.”

Beelzebub made a discontented noise.

“But then they won’t properly be them anymore,” Adam replied as Dog stepped up, a few scribbled runes on the inside of his collar making him look rather a lot more of a Hellhound than usual. “I learned that last time. You can’t just restart people, that’ll be just like killing them.”

Crowley and Aziraphale had taken the chance to hide behind the Bentley and begin to argue with each other about the placement of sigils. By complete accident, sitting there behind Crowley’s beloved car, a few scribbles had managed to make an effect that was entirely unexpected. 

The mat began flashing in very odd colours that looked and felt rather odd. Anathema, seized by a burst of inspiration, fumbled in her stapled book and looked down at the words. 

Boom, it said, in font that was entirely too big.

By complete accident, the angel-demon duo had managed to balance power out and harness a source of power that was completely unstable and unlikely to work ever again. Regardless, though, the mat was kind of probably going to explode before everyone’s eyes. In the short space of a few seconds, everyone behind the Bentley scattered and ran for cover just as the mat flipped over, glowed, and faded. 

“Well,” Newt said, looking down at the book, “That was anticlimatic.”

“Go. Away,” Adam said, and Dog growled at his side. For the briefest moment, there was a flash of something deeply powerful and antichrist-y in him that rather threatened the two in front of him. “I like this world, and you’re not taking it. Call off the attack”

Shadwell would have tried to shoot Beelzebub, so that was precisely what Newt didn’t do. Besides, he didn’t feel like bringing along something like that would have worked very well, anyway. “Uh, pardon me,” he suggested, walking up because for the moment the Bentley with the possible exploding mat wasn’t a safe space, “but what about, say, waiting seventy years or so before you come back? I mean, none of you really want Adam here to fight you. Right?”

Crowley rolled his eyes invisibly behind his sunglasses at how extraordinarily unconvincing Newt was being. He stood up, brushing off his palms, and gave the effect of leaning against thin air. “Last time you were all for a proper process. Now, what I’m guessing here is that you’d really not be doing everything this way, right?”  
Aziraphale lit up with an idea, staying by the side with Crowley. “You didn’t really decide that Armageddon’s process was hopeless, I’d imagine- more that it was too complicated to do because Crowley here messed it all up.”

“Thanks, Angel,” Crowley hissed, “Very nice.”

But Crowley did have an idea, and improvising did work somewhat if he was dealing with powers such as those who had authority and all but not too experienced in dealing with unexpected developments. “So what you do is wait until Adam here ages to death, because clearly he’s aging. He’s at least that much taller. If the Antichrist’s dead, you can get another proper one. Raise it well. As for me, I think I’ll be retiring. Alpha Centauri or some other star system somewhere, probably a lot farther.”

“One moment. We’re… going to have to talk about this,” Gabriel said, and patted Beelzebub on the shoulder in an attempt to say something. They exchanged a few words, throwing liberal glances towards all those present, and simply vanished after a minute or so: Gabriel with a flash of light and Beelzebub with churned earth in their wake. 

Wensleydale blinked. “Is that it?” he asked, looking worriedly at the spot where the two non-humans had vanished. 

Everyone else engaged in a bit of staring at each other and being worried, because none of them had any authority on the matter of higher-ups. A page floated out of Anathema’s former book, two previously nonsensical prophecies making perfect sense as they settled down- one image partially folded and the other one on top made up a sentence, in clear English. 

They will be back. 

Anathema blinked, her eyes on the note, and turned it over on a hunch. There was nothing there. “I’m still not actually sure if I miss the prophecies,” she murmured to herself. “Knowing what to do.”

“If there’s trouble later I think she’ll get a message through eventually,” Newt shrugged, watching as Crowley immediately miracled himself a towel. Occult symbols simply couldn’t be just miracled off unless he wanted to go at it by stripping off all the paint, but it was still marker. Ordinary influences could let it off. The towel was sleek and black and somehow managed to look cool in the way Crowley thought Aziraphale’s socks weren’t. 

Even then, it took only a few minutes for Crowley to finish polishing his car, beckon Aziraphale in, and sail off without so much as a ‘So long, suckers.’

Anathema glanced down at the almost-book and wondered when something would explode. It did, a few days later, as Newt decided that cooking might actually work for him because fire was not the same thing as technology and a stovetop was like a stapler.


	8. Chapter 8

A bit less than several decades later- not nearly long enough, in their opinion- Aziraphale and Crowley shared a drink in the privacy of a bookshop that was rather alike but not quite the one Aziraphale had owned just a ten decades ago. The space just outside the window was odd, and though natural lighting glowed neatly through clear, clean glass the human figures outside were somehow blurred. Some people walked through the window and vanished into the shop that had replaced Aziraphale’s store after a while, sprouting like all shops did after a while and leaving some to wonder exactly what happened to the nice bookshop owner who never really tried to let anyone in but had some really neat books. 

Crowley had set his dark sunglasses on the table a while ago, slitted yellow eyes almost gleaming in the slightly dim lantern light on the very interior. His pupils were larger than they usually were, and something has shifted in the way he looked at Aziraphale in the century’s time they were afforded by a stupid gambit that much long ago. Even when humans had tended to try odd things with their clothing and appearances, Crowley had decided sunglasses were cool and was not about to let go of them without a proper fight. In the years before, basically everyone had died and passed on like everyone else, but they- as immortal beings- stayed. In the odd way time moved for the particularly long-lived, the century had seemed shorter than the rest precisely because of the pair worrying every year as to whether the world would end then, while they were enjoying themselves. 

For humans, in the few years they got to live, life was generally sweeter with a sword hanging over their head head- much of their tiny lives were spent either trying to shield themselves from the eventual snap of that hair or enjoying themselves while they still could, partying and having fun and doing things they could. 

“I like this planet,” Crowley decided, setting down his glass with a satisfied noise before refilling it. “We wouldn’t know, of course, but I don’t think there’ll ever be another really like it. Would be a blessed shame to see it gone.”

There was so much neither of them had seen yet. With the development of more technology, books had begun going out of print about as quickly as hand-written manuscripts once the printing press had been invented, but Aziraphale was still a collector- of books, now, along with other things. “There’s always the chance Upstairs has forgotten about us,” Aziraphale said with a small chuckle. “Humans. Wonderful species, really.”

“Unpredictable and odd, but once in a while someone particularly brilliant comes in and sometimes it makes the dull planet interesting. If they don’t die soon I can see them gradually spreading among the stars we helped make,wreaking war and havoc with gusto and still unaware of anything important,” the demon mused. “I think when it comes to that I’ll stay and try to keep this world whole as far as it’s possible.”

“I’d like to see where they go, yes,” Aziraphale nodded, glancing out of the window. Neither had tried to mess with the newfangled brain implants and such when they got out, not quite willing to risk an accidental discovery with some incredibly inspired humans some years down the line. “They’re going much faster than I think anyone thought would be possible. Give them enough time and they might eventually even get a chance against our sides.”

If such a thing was even possible, there had been a total shutdown in communication between Heaven, Hell, and Earth years ago. Maybe they were hiding better, maybe biding their time before they could come back- but for now, all was silent and it had been nice having no obligations despite the occasional worried glance thrown over a shoulder. 

“Fancy a trip to the moon?”


End file.
